‘Want to write better poetry? Put down your pen and start reading’
Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, offers his tips to
On Simon Armitage’s website, you can find the nine poems he’s written in his first year as Britain’s poet laureate. Eight come with a footnote explaining what inspired them: the opening of a concert hall, say, or the launch of a polar research ship. But his most recent poem doesn’t need a footnote. The title does the job: Lockdown.
For the first time since taking up the post last May, the 56-year-old “felt a personal responsibility” to respond to current events with a poem, he tells me over the phone. “I’ve not really felt that obligation before… [but] this affects everybody globally. It’s very oppressive. It feels unique.” Lockdown looks back as far as the Black Death to find a parallel with coronavirus, imagining that plague in a “waking dream/ of infected fleas”.
Writing about the crisis while it’s still unfolding has been a challenge. “At the moment, everybody seems to be preoccupied with it, including me – and that’s not a good place to be writing from.” Once it’s the “new normal”, he thinks it will get easier: “I expect I will get quite a lot of writing done in the weeks to come. I don’t know what else I’m going to do!”
Armitage has been forced to cancel the debut tour for his new band, LYR, after just two shows. Some might be surprised to find the laureate moonlighting as lead vocalist for an ambient rock group. But he has long had rock-star aspirations; his 2008 memoir Gig even had the subtitle “The Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist”. Is LYR just an attempt to live out those fantasies?
“A lot of poets have worked with music and with musicians, going right back to John Dryden, the first laureate
– who was writing, for want of a better word, song lyrics,” he says. “The two things are not disconnected.”
Armitage’s interest in what he calls “the little overlap, the cross-hatch area in the middle” between poetry and song is evident on his new Radio 4 series, The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed. It’s recorded in, yes, his shed,
Tristram Fane Saunders
‘Once lockdown becomes the ‘new normal’, I expect I will get a lot of writing done. I don’t know what else to do!’
in the garden of his home in Huddersfield where he lives with his wife, Sue, a radio producer. Guests so far have included Angel of the North sculptor Antony Gormley and Elbow singer-songwriter Guy Garvey.
As Oxford Professor of Poetry, Armitage last year expressed his distaste for writers who are “opaque in poetry, either deliberately or through lack of talent”. Though stopping short of naming offenders, he lamented a “slow but discernible shift” towards a poetry of “specialist knowledge” that tends to “exclude and alienate”.
His own poetry is usually marked by its clarity and casual tone, even when leading the reader in strange directions. His 1997 poem The Mariner’s Compass, for example, imagined houses taking to the sea with “duvet covers” for sails.
Armitage is convinced that, as the lockdown drags on and the country is forced to adapt to a slower, more cautious pace of life, more of us will find ourselves turning to poetry.
“People will have more time to devote to that level of language. Poetry is the language of concentration – irrespective of the subject matter.
“That kind of pace and focus can be really helpful at times like this. Particularly if we’re thinking long-term about how we come through this, and what sort of world we want to live in afterwards – given that the world that we’ve left behind was incredibly hectic and chaotic and rushed. I think people find confidence and consolation in poetry just through it being so careful.”
Does he have any advice for anyone who wants to start writing seriously?
“It depends on what sort of a poet you want to be. Are you doing it instead of a crossword or watching Pointless or doing some knitting, or are you somebody who wants to get better, and get published, mean something to readers? If that’s the case, then you’re better starting by reading poetry rather than writing it.
“There’s really only one lesson: you can’t be a writer unless you’re a reader. What goes out is a version of what goes in.”
LYR’S album Call in the Crash Team is out in May; Magnetic Field (Faber, £14.99) is out now; The Poet Laureate Has Gone to
His Shed continues on Radio 4 on Saturdays at 7.15pm